
CINEBENCH
What is MAXON Cinebench?
CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.
HOW DOES CINEBENCH WORK?

Main Processor Performance

The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral „No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza).
This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 256 processor threads.
This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Graphics Card Performance

This procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (created by renderbaron) which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode.
The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, on the drivers used. The graphics card has to display a huge amount of geometry (nearly 1 million polygons) and textures, as well as a variety of effects, such as environments, bump maps, transparency, lighting and more to evaluate the performance across different disciplines and give a good average overview of the capabilities of your graphics hardware. The result is measured in frames per second (fps). The higher the number, the faster your graphics card is.
WHO SHOULD USE CINEBENCH?
Anyone who needs to evaluate hardware performance should add MAXON CINEBENCH to the test tool arsenal. System administrators can use CINEBENCH to help make purchase decisions, journalists can use the results in reviewing hardware, hardware manufacturers may utilize the feedback in optimizing their latest products. Any computer owner can evaluate his or her individual system. Unlike abstract benchmarks, which only test specific functions of CPUs or GPUs, CINEBENCH offers a real-world benchmark that incorporates a user’s common tasks within Cinema 4D to measure a system’s performance. For those who have to do a serious amount of testing CINEBENCH also provides a command line option, allowing users to run automated test procedures.
Supported Systems
WINDOWS
Vista (64-bit), 7 (64-bit), 8 (64-bit)
Minimum CPU:
Intel Pentium 4, Athlon 64
MACINTOSH
Equal or higher than 10.6 – 10.11 (64-bit)
Minimum CPU:
Intel Core 2 Solo
Supported Processors: Intel Pentium 4, Intel Pentium 4 D, Intel XEON, Intel Core 2, Intel Core i7, Intel Core i5, Intel Core i3, Intel Celeron, Intel Celeron D, AMD Sempron, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, AMD Phenom, AMD FX, AMD Ontario, AMD Zacate, AMD Kabini, AMD Temash, AMD Beema, AMD Mullins, AMD Llano, AMD Trinity, AMD Richland, AMD Kaveri
Technical Information
The OpenGL benchmark requires a graphics card that supports OpenGL 2.1 and has at least 512 MB of graphics memory. CINEBENCH will test the graphics card to ensure it supports the necessary features to display the test scene correctly. If the graphics card does not support the necessary features or is too slow (< 1 fps), a warning will be displayed and the OpenGL benchmark will not be performed.
Before benchmarking the graphics card, CINEBENCH will check if the hardware supports the necessary features. To ensure accurate results, CINEBENCH compares a single test frame rendered by the graphics card with reference images stored inside the application, and returns a Reference Match percentage. A small difference is tolerable (displayed in green pixels), as it results from slightly different shading, etc. depending on the graphics card and driver. If the difference is beyond a preset threshold, CINEBENCH interprets this as an incorrect display. This may indicate that transparencies, shadows or other display properties are not properly supported. In such cases, CINEBENCH will display a warning message and indicate the differences with red pixels in the display. In some cases the test will be executed anyway, but no result will be displayed as it cannot be accurately compared with others. In extreme cases, the OpenGL benchmark will not be performed.
Keep in mind that driver updates can also affect the reference match score. In most cases, you should always ensure the most recent stable driver version is installed on your system. On Windows systems, you can download drivers from the system or graphics card manufacturer and install them manually. On Mac OS X, make sure any pending software updates have been applied.
The graphics benchmark in CINEBENCH is designed to minimize the influence of other system components. All geometry, shaders and textures are stored on the graphics card prior to measurement, and no code is loaded during the measurement process. This minimizes the system influence, but unfortunately cannot eliminate it entirely.